“Brian?” the man’s voice called in the hall. “Are you in there? It’s Dok. I wanted to check on you, make sure you got home all right.”
Old Fart listened. The room next door was silent. He climbed to his feet and stood next to Kel, who was still staring into the hall. Old Fart followed his gaze and realized Kel had locked his eyes on the girl.
The black face appeared again in the doorway. “He’s not answering,” the man—the doctor—said. He slumped against the doorframe. “Would you mind if we wait here in your hall? We’ve been walking for hours.”
“You must really need some supplies from Brian, huh?” Kel asked. The man stood up straight again.
“No. We’re not here for Brian’s business. We just need to rest a little while.”
The girl leaned forward, holding a bag of crackers. “We can share,” she said.
Kel stepped back. “Sure. You can wait in here. We’ll sit here an’ wait for Brian. Why the fuck not?” The girl started to step over the hole and Kel offered her a hand. “Careful. There’s a, you know, a hole.” He ushered them into his room.
She nodded and barely smiled. The cut across her cheek seemed like it was in a bad place for smiling. She took Kel’s hand and he helped her inside.
The stinking underground room in what was called Fiend territory
Plastic.
That was what the man’s memories called this material. A plastic bag. Sato fought the urge to breathe; sucking the bag into his mouth and nostrils made him feel more desperate for air. Finally, shamefully, the body overcame his will, sucking hard against the bag and flattening it against his face. Sato strained the body’s arms and legs against the arched position in which he was bound.
The bag came away again. Sato breathed deeply, staring angrily up at the steely-eyed Divinators. This time they had chosen to let him stay conscious. Why?
Suffocation had caused the body to get an involuntary erection. What Sato would euphemistically have called his “son” in Japan, and what the other man called his “prick” or “cock,” was swollen and twitching. A strong fist seized it as someone whispered another question in his ear but the language failed to register. The fist released him and the electric cord struck his son, first from one direction and then another. Sato fought back the humiliation by reminding himself that the body was not his.
The Divinators wore all black clothes. They chanted and communicated with each other in a strange language, and they had replaced the small flickering oil lamp with two wide bowls of blazing fire. Periodically they would throw powders into the flames, filling the room with strange-smelling smoke. Over and over they asked the same questions, and each time Sato gave the same answers: He followed bushido, the ancient samurai code of honor that demanded complete loyalty and obedience to superiors, and that had required his ritual suicide in service to the daimyo. He feared loss of honor, not death. Discipline and order were essential in all human endeavors because they separated us from the animals.
One Divinator held his head. Another pulled his lips apart and dropped a bitter liquid on his gums. He gnashed his teeth and tore a bit of flesh from the finger, spitting at his captors.
They pulled the plastic back over his face.
Shitbox Manor
“Didn’t know you came to see people at home,” Kel said, spreading his fingers and closing them around the widest bunch of crackers he could manage. He was sitting on one side of the girl, talking to the doctor across from him. The student fuck in the uniform was sitting on the girl’s other side. The student fuck, the doctor, and Old Fart had only taken one cracker apiece, because they were pussies.
“I don’t, very often,” the doctor said. “But this is a … It’s sort of an emergency. Did you notice anything unusual about Brian when you saw him?”
“Left his door open when he went. That’s fuckin’ weird, ’specially for Brian.”
“Yeah,” Dok said. “That’s the kind of thing I’m worried about. Hopefully he’ll be coming back soon.”
Kel nodded, stuffing crackers in his mouth. “Mmm.” He took out the new notebook and his lighter, flicking it but getting no fire. Usually the lighter flamed up fine with his left hand. He set the lighter down, switched the crackers to the left hand, and tried again with the right. “Fuck it all,” he said, spraying cracker crumbs. “Outta gas.” A few crumbs stuck on the rubber patch over his knee. He poked them with an index finger and scraped them back into his mouth with his teeth.
“Thanks so much for letting us wait here with you,” the girl said. “It’s a big help.” She offered Old Fart another cracker. He almost ate it but then shut his eyes hard and pinched his lips together tight, like he was struggling to keep down whatever was left in his guts.
“Hey, Doc,” Kel said. “Can you fix Old Fart? He’s hung over like a motherfucker. I don’t want him pukin’ again.”
Dok turned to Old Fart. “I can help, if you like.”
Old Fart hesitated, then gave a little nod. Dok took Old Fart’s wrists and found some special spots there, then pushed his thumbs into them.
“Feel a little better?” Dok asked.
Old Fart nodded. “I do. I actually do feel better!”
“Now you press here,” Dok said. “Fold your arms.”
Old Fart crossed his arms and put his thumbs where Dok’s had been. Dok took a little package from his shirt pocket and got a couple of really thin needles from it. He took Old Fart’s arms again and put needles where the thumbs had been. Then he took hold of Old Fart’s head and put another needle in his ear, just a little above and a little behind where the sound went in. He put one more needle in the other ear and looked back at Kel. “I might be able to help you, too. I see you favoring one shoulder; it looks like you’re really in pain.”
Kel glanced at Old Fart, who was smiling down at the needles in his arms like they were the most wonderful fucking things in the world. “Naw,” Kel said. “Thanks, but I don’t want nothin’ stickin’ in me. An’ it ain’t that bad.”
Dok smiled. “Whatever you say. Thank you for letting us stay here, just the same.”
“Sure,” Kel said. “We weren’t doin’ nothin’ anyways. Right Old Fart?”
The girl laughed, turning to Old Fart. “Why does he call you that?”
Old Fart smiled. “It’s … Oh, it doesn’t matter. You might as well call me ‘Old Fart,’ too. And what can we call you?”
The girl’s eyes flicked to the doctor. The doctor’s eyes got big and he shook his head.
“I’m Kelvin,” Kel said. “Kelvin Mays.”
“Ooh!” the girl said, pointing at the notebook. “What’s that? What are you writing?”
Kel looked down. “Writing?”
“I haven’t gotten to read anything for a long time,” Eadie said. “Can I look at this? Would you mind?” Her hand settled on the notebook’s cover.
Kel felt himself smiling like a big dummy. He heard his own voice before he decided to talk. “Go ahead.”
She picked it up, opened it. She flipped some pages, then stared at one for a while. Her eyes opened wide and she shook her head a little. “This is amazing,” she said. “These are all your own ideas? I thought I was the only one who had these thoughts. It’s brilliant. It’s really, really touching.”
Kel looked at her sideways. “Of course it’s touching you. You’re holding it in your hand.”
She smiled, or almost smiled, and stared some more. Then she talked all weird, like all the words were already in her head. This was more like what Kel had thought of as “reading.”
Our system has met its goals of efficiency and avoidance of conflict, but at a terrible price. Everyone lives the life they’re told to live. Children obey parents, getting stuck in careers and marriages someone else sets up for them, and eventually they grow up to control the lives of their own kids the same way. And while they might resent the control, they would never dream of rejecting it, because the only way to live free of it is to live in hopeless povert
y and fear. A lifetime of having decisions made for you and being bullied by the same bosses is still better than starving or freezing or being beaten to death. The best we can hope for is to be assigned as gears in the biggest possible apparatus, turned by the other gears nearby.
Eventually the lifetime of training pays off and we end up put into the corporate (or public) Brain Trust, having our brains used for storage and processing as our bodies are kept alive with mass-produced equipment. We’re just fleshy components of a giant machine.
The only question left to us is: What is our machine producing?
The stinking underground room in what has been called Fiend territory
Pain flashed through the body, burning every nerve and searing an afterimage across the flickering misty darkness of Sato’s vision. The men—and women, too, Sato now observed—in black robes floated past, chanting. Their sizes alternated from minuscule to gigantic. Perhaps they were not chanting. Maybe they were grinding or scraping something, producing a sound like chanting. The fire pots floated and bobbed about the room like tiny toy boats. He inhaled, sucking all the fire inside the body, and then blew flames across the room. The Divinators drew energy from the fire he exhaled, growing larger.
The liquid they had given him was a hallucinogen; he had deduced this from the other man’s memories, and it was the reason he was experiencing the world this way. It made things seem detached and strange. In Sato’s case, it also blended the physical world with the misty dreamworld he had traveled through to get here. The room was partially hidden by smoke and by the mist. He looked out through the eyes he knew were not his, suddenly becoming aware that the other man was looking out through them, too. Another presence was sharing the same experience.
As he suffered another flash of intense and excruciating pain, Sato realized it was this other man’s pain, and his vitriolic, consuming anger that took over the body, making it scream in agony and rage. Sato understood that he was feeling only some fraction of what this man felt; the drug blended them somewhat but not completely. Several times in Sato’s youth, his teachers had brought him to the brink of unconsciousness through pain and exhaustion, but the sensations he was getting from this man were beyond anything he had experienced in Japan. This man had no way to become unconscious, no escape from the torment.
“This is good,” Sato said, not knowing whether he was speaking the words aloud or not. It did not matter. The man would understand. “Now you will feel through me, as I feel through you. Like these Divinators, you will understand that I am what I say. I am samurai. My mission is to serve the Life Force. I cannot be stopped and I cannot be killed. You will be rid of me only when the mission is complete.”
The presence he had felt faded away again, leaving Sato to stare out through the eyes alone.
A Divinator placed three fingers on his forehead. “You have proven yourself worthy, Samurai. Welcome to the New Union.”
10
Kelvin’s rathole apartment
A quick, scratching noise …
Lawrence opened his eyes. It was a match. Kelvin Mays was lighting a wick in a saucer of stinky overused cooking oil. The metallic tattoos on his forearms—bizarre patterns of squares and squiggles and sharp angles everywhere—flashed angrily as the wick caught and burned. The tall tube in which Kelvin kept his hair cast a strange shadow onto the wall and ceiling above his head. It looked like a tree with very short limbs and a trunk that was much too wide.
They had all eaten and fallen asleep. The sun had gone down; the heavy tangle of wood and plastic that served as a window now looked out on total darkness.
Eadie was still sleeping. Kelvin tried to get the notebook from under her head, gently pushing it one way and pulling from a corner. She shifted in her sleep, covering it up. He managed to get hold of an edge and rip a small portion of the paper out.
“Kel,” the old man said quietly. “Why were you moaning about the lighter being out of gas all day when you had matches all along?”
“Only got three matches, Fart. When they’re gone, they’re gone.”
The old man turned to Lawrence. “You’ve been waiting a long time. Maybe this guy you’re looking for isn’t coming back.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t make the plan. I’m just following along.”
The man nodded. “Is that a Fisher uniform?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, you’ll be working for McGuillian. I’ve heard great things about that company. I went to Federal National, myself.”
Lawrence swallowed. “Really, sir?” He was too loud. Eadie stirred. Lawrence lowered his voice. “I’ve never known a FedNat graduate. You folks can go to any firm you choose, and they bid for you! That must’ve been amazing, Mister … uh, sir.”
The man smiled. “My name is Roan, but please just call me Old Fart. Kel, there, started it, and in this part of town it seems to fit best.”
“Thank you, Mr. Old Fart, sir,” Lawrence said, laughing. “I’m …” He glanced at Eadie. She was still in the position she had slept in but now her eyes were open.
“Oh, you might as well tell him,” she said, sitting up. “We’re pathetically easy to identify, with or without our names. What could be more conspicuous than your uniform, Dok’s skin, the Prophet’s … self?”
She nodded at Old Fart. “I’m Eadie.”
“And I’m Lawrence Williams, the Seventh, sir.”
“Oh, Kel,” Old Fart said, gesturing at the ball of paper between Kelvin’s palms. “Why do you have to do that? I’m telling you, it’s dangerous for your health.”
Kel pinched the ball between his thumb and index finger, lifting it to his face and examining it. He raised his middle finger at Old Fart and pulled a small vial of liquid from one of his pockets.
“Here, ask the doctor,” Old Fart said. “He’ll tell you about homemade nicotine. Am I right, sir?”
Dok shrugged.
Kel put the ball into a makeshift pipe, meting a few drops onto it from the vial.
“Or … or this fellow. I believe your new friend Eadie called him the Prophet.” Old Fart smiled at the Prophet, who stared back flatly. “You must be pretty good with predictions, sir, am I right? Isn’t it true that if Kel doesn’t stop smoking, it’ll kill him?”
Lawrence watched as the Prophet turned his head toward Kel, then back to Old Fart. The Prophet stared a moment and then he … smiled. Lawrence felt suddenly colder.
“No,” said the Prophet.
The stinking underground room in what was called Fiend territory
Sato stared out the open door. It was certainly not a trap; nobody waited to catch him in an attempt to escape because he was obviously physically unable to lift himself from the floor. Still, he fought to remain alert.
And so he had joined an army. An army of filthy peasants. But the other man’s memories showed that this was a backward place where merchants were organized like armies; of course warriors thrust down among peasants would lead them to battle against such an abomination!
There had been no further communication with the man who also inhabited this body. Hopefully he now understood the importance of Sato’s mission and would no longer interfere.
The door creaked and a young boy of about thirteen years entered the room. He silently crossed the floor and lifted one of Sato’s arms, kneeling to hold it in his lap. “Welcome to the New Union, Rounder Samurai,” the boy said.
Sato’s tormentors had used the term “Rounder.” It was a designation of rank, higher than an ordinary inductee here, though still quite low.
The boy wrapped a cloth around Sato’s arm. Sato’s exhausted mind sensed the sharp stab on the inside of his forearm and the cloth being released. The arm felt cold.
“This is a gift from Patrol Leader Coiner,” the boy said. His words floated around Sato’s head before sinking in. Sato slipped into unconsciousness.
Amelix Retreat
A SUBSIDIARY OF AMELIX INTEGRATIONS
Recond
itioning Feedback Form
Seeker of Understanding
INVOLUNTARY, GRADE TWO
Subject: #117B882QQ
Division: Corporate Regulations
Dear #117B882QQ,
Congratulations on your upgrade to Seeker of Understanding, Involuntary, Grade Two.
1. Please describe today’s combat simulation exercise.
I have never been so exhausted. It feels like I haven’t slept in a week. My eyes keep closing and it’s hard to force my hand to write.
Today was another combat simulation against Andro-Heathcliffe. I went out with them, side by side this time, slinking down the street, doing what Burt calls “hunting A-Heaves.” Seazie was leading, and I was surprised by how confident she was. She kept the group together but spread everyone out just enough that some of us would be able to return fire if we were attacked.
It was only about ten minutes before we came across a band of three AH Seekers. 6T saw them first and froze, aiming, which tipped off the rest of us. We all stopped and took aim. I got one in my sights. They spotted us and tried to fire, and we unleashed on them. I scored three or four shots on my man to the head and chest. All three went down. I was breathing hard and it felt like you could power a city with the current running down my spine. Until that moment I’d never felt more than a trickle of life flowing in me, but pulling that trigger was like releasing a torrent of energy from somewhere inside my head.
Some other A-Heaves fired from farther down the street. We took cover and shot back. There was no thinking at all—it was all reflex and reaction. I dove behind a piece of concrete when I saw one leap through a doorway, and I let off a few shots at the brick wall behind. The shots ricocheted around the room beyond the door, and the Heave dropped. I laughed out loud, thrilled that I’d made two kills. When my team started moving, I did, too, and we quickly overtook the last A-Heave. We disarmed her and took her captive.
The Book of Eadie, Volume One of the Seventeen Trilogy Page 16
